Loving Men-Foreground (Artem Stories)

I was talking to Artem this afternoon between kisses and asked him, “when do you think we’ll understand the typography of each others’ body?”

He replied, “why, is that when you’ll tire of me?”

“Tire of you,” I asked, “tire of you?”

Why does familiarity breed contempt? Why should my feeling comfortable with touching Artem’s torso, his shoulders, his hips, or buttocks sans the need to rip open all his clothes, mark the end of one phase and the beginning of another? Of course we’re still steering our respective galleons toward physical exploration and the discovery of rapture. But anchoring off the coast of each other doesn’t mean we’re like hurricanes which lose their fury once making landfall.

What Artem hadn’t realised was that he wasn’t part of a group photograph. No, Artem was a candid, caught in my lens without knowledge; a selfless selfie; his image kidnapped and placed between four black corners on an even blacker piece of construction paper.